HP Envy 7640 Printer – Detailed Review.

High Quality Printers

The HP Envy 7640 is an all – in – one – printer that is likely to appeal to those working out of offices in their homes or run small scale businesses as it takes care of printing activities quite immaculately thanks to its abundant features. It is a color printer that has a special service wherein it offers the HP Instant Ink Service. This unique feature ensures that ink cartridges are delivered to one’s doorstep when the current cartridges are about to be exhausted. This is done by an automated notification that is sent to the HP services department and one can opt for this unique feature at a monthly fee.

What makes HP Envy 7640 a must have for small business and home office owners is the simple fact that all the heavy duty features of an office printer have been transferred to this printer making it extremely functional for everyday use. Besides, it has also been priced accordingly and makes it worth one’s money. The printer comes with a set of two cartridges – black and color along with a software CD, power chord along with a chord for the phone and a detailed manual of instructions for the user. Given below are some features that are worth glancing at to ensure that they meet your requirements before you decide to jump the gun.

Design and Appearance:

The design itself is not something that one would associate with impressive as its rounded corners and overall chunky look gives it a bulky feel. While storing it will hardly pose any issues, it is the fingerprints that one will have to keep cleaning off the surface of the printer as they are visible quite easily. This is true more se in case of the reflective front edge.

Page storage:

The page storage feature for the HP Envy 7640 is quite impressive as it can stack nearly 125 sheets in the input paper tray and about 15 photo sheets that can be placed easily in the photo tray. When both are combined together, the output tray can accommodate 25 sheets at a time, which is extremely impressive. The fact that this machine has a dual tray setup makes it incredibly time saving for anyone who needs to print a large set of documents as one need not manually place pages in the input tray. Besides, it has two cartridges one being black and the other being a color one. Fitting these cartridges into the printer is as easy as placing them in their slot and clicking them in place. Another feature that makes the HP Envy 7640 a desirable home office printer is the fact that it possesses automatic two sided printing feature.

Setting up the printer:

This is perhaps, one of the most fun and easy aspect of the HP 7640 all – in – one – printer. The responsive LED Touchscreen is fun and colourful and displays all the information and step – by – step instructions that need to be followed in a an informative animation and therefore, it takes a record time of 4 minutes or less to set up one’s printer for printing purposes. With so much care that has been gone into ensuring that all details are understood there is a very slim chance that something might go wrong during the process of installation.

Wireless Connectivity:

Another impressive feature of the HP 7640 printer is its ability to connect to mobile devices to get the print job done. In addition to this, it also has a Wi – Fi Direct feature that uses the HP e-Print as well as Apple AirPrint and other such software programs for a quick printing solution in a wireless environment. However, if one would like to use wires and chords then they can do so with the help of one of the two USB 2.0 ports and an Ethernet port that are also provided.

Print and Scan resolution:

Whilst the document printing feature is phenomenal with an output rate of 14ppm in black and 9ppm in color and a resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi. The images are crisp and loss in detail is less for both black and white and color prints. However, the same does not apply for the photo prints as one would experience a certain amount of quality loss when printing in this mode. While HP claims that their photo print feature can give users a ‘lab quality’ photo effect, it barely holds on to that fact as even the black and white images fail to give the sharp, bold and crisp feel that one would expect in photographs and instead, they looked a tad blurry, which is an obvious let down.

The resolution for scanning images and documents is an impressive 1200 x 1200 dpi and is supportive of flatbed scanning, which is a complete winner for this printer. The process for scanning documents is very easy to follow and one gets the option to scan the documents to their computer, email address or an external memory device. With as little as under 25 seconds needed for one scan, the HP 7640 definitely does not disappoint in the scanning department.

Pros:

The HP 7640 is incredibly easy to set up and following instructions through animated step – by – step is a fresh approach.

Dual trays separating plain paper and photo paper is a neat feature that avoids any confusion when printing pages and documents.

Wireless feature along with print and scan speeds are very impressive.

Cons:

Print quality for photographs is average.

One might experience paper jams every once in a while.

Verdict:

The HP 7640 all – in – one printer is definitely worth a buy for its vast range of features at an affordable price. However, it is strictly for people who would use the machine for printing documents and do not rely heavily on photograph printing.